This page contains live results for Pennsylvania. My goal is not to predict the winner of the state. In fact, it’s the opposite. My goal is to understand where the tallied votes are from, where the untallied votes are from, and encourage caution in making assumptions on incomplete data.
There are three categories of ballot: in-person, mail-in that has already been received (“returned”), and mail-in that has not yet been received (“outstanding”). Any ballot postmarked by 11/3 and received by 11/6 will be counted (unless the Supreme Court interferes). Counted Votes include all in-person and an unknown proportion returned mail-ins.*
Updated 1:04 AM
Counted Votes: The current total votes for each candidate. These are from electionreturns.pa.gov, and include results from an unknown number of precincts.
Uncounted Mail-Ins*: An estimate of the returned mail-in ballots left to count. This is just proportion of mail-ins left to be counted times the mail-ins from the party (e.g. if 50% of mail-ins have been counted, Biden’s Uncounted Mail-Ins is 50% of the mail-ins returned by Democrats). I do not correct for rejected ballots or provisional ballots.
Remaining Live Votes: This is a super naive allocation of votes in the precincts that haven’t yet reported. The PA data does not show how many precincts have reported from a given county. So I take the 2016 turnout, apply a multiplier, and subtract the current vote total. That multiplier starts at 1.0 but will change through the night. Remaining Live Votes serves only as an order of magnitude. Do not trust it. Just wait.
Outstanding Mail-Ins: This is the number of mail-in ballots that have not been marked received yet. Ballots received through 11/6 will be counted, unless the Supreme Court interferes.
Data Sources
Live results from electionreturns.pa.gov. (Updated 2020-11-04 01:04:09)
Mail-in data from data.pa.gov. (Updated 2020-11-03 11:28:57)